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Sunday, July 25, 2010

Businesses you can start from P26,000 to P50,000

Got more money than P25,000 and wanted to put up a small business using that money? Well, Entrepreneur magazine official website is very generous enough to share this article: Part 2 of businesses you can start from P1k to P100k I enjoyed reading it and I hope you will enjoy it as well.

Joby Linsangan-Moreno was supposed to study to become a doctor after graduating as a medical technologist. Oliver Rempillo was working in a government agency as an exhibitions designer and organizer but thought of setting his sights elsewhere. And Corazon "Baby" Coligado, a registered nurse, couldn't land the job she wanted abroad.

The three then decided to take different paths to career success. With a little capital and a lot of effort, they have become successful entrepreneurs--proof that you don't need more than P50,000 to get started in business.

But each had a different reason for going into it.

"At that time, I wanted to do something different, something exciting and liberating," says Linsangan-Moreno, who, instead of pursuing a medical degree on top of her medical technology education, put up Orange Blush Salon in June 2003 in her native Cabanatuan City.

The licensed medical technologist, who went into the salon business with just P30,000, recalls: "I come from a family of professionals, and my friends were either employed or were planning to go work abroad. None of them, except my boyfriend [Lawrence Moreno] who's now my husband, considered going into business." Linsangan-Moreno has since grown her salon to seven branches: six in Cabanatuan and its surrounding towns in Nueva Ecija, and another in Sta. Rosa in Laguna.

In the case of Rempillo, he decided to start a business along the same lines as his job of designing and organizing booths for exhibitions with CITEM (Center for International Trade Expositions and Missions), an agency under the Department of Trade and Industry.

"Basically, I set up En Theos Creative because it's what I'd been doing all along," he says of the business he and his wife Mira founded in September 2007, also with just P30,000. "It's been ingrained in me since 1999, so I stayed in the design field."

Rempillo says he saw an emerging market for the services of exhibitions companies after learning of the construction of SMX, a major exhibition hall beside the SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City.
For a long time, he says, companies only had the Philippine Trade Training Center (PTTC), the World Trade Center (WTC), and the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) as major venues for exhibits. "In the mid-'90s, SM built the Megatrade Hall [at the SM Megamall in Mandaluyong City] but it used to only host small shows," he says.

For Coligado, the route to entrepreneurship took her away from her nursing career. She was working as a nurse at the Laguna Provincial Hospital when something happened in 2006 that prompted her to find a better-paying job in the United States--her husband Ferdinand, a seaman, stopped working after undergoing a gall-bladder operation. She was then only earning P13,000 a month as a government nurse, which was not enough to support a family of four. "But I wasn't lucky enough to get work abroad," she says.

At this point, a friend of Coligado suggested that she might as well go into the business that their town of Liliw, Laguna, had long been noted for: handmade slippers and shoes. She heeded the advice and, with an initial capital of P50,000 from her husband's previous earnings overseas, put up Ai-She Footwear in March 2006 (the company's name is a composite of the first syllables of the names of their daughters Aira and Shelly).

Since then, the company has been making abaca-lined shoes and slippers, distributing them to department stores in Manila and to retail outlets in Southern Luzon.

Savings to earnings

One thing in common among Linsangan-Moreno, Rempillo, and Coligado is that they started a business using only their personal or family savings.

Linsangan-Moreno says she built her P30,000 capital by setting aside part of her salary as both medical technologist and instructor at the Good Samaritan Hospital and Colleges in Cabanatuan.

"Before I went into business, I figured out that I was quite OK with managing finances and budgeting," she says. "I first considered franchising a known salon but didn't have the money for it, so I decided to put up my own."

Rempillo likewise started En Theos Creative with only about P30,000 in initial capital, using the funds to buy a personal computer for doing his design work. "The money I needed wasn't big enough for me to get a loan from a bank," he explains.

For Coligado, her husband Ferdinand's monthly income of P60,000 as a seaman had enabled her to save enough money to get her footwear business started. Although she had set the funds aside not for business but simply as reserve, it came handy when Ferdinand had to quit his job due to illness. "Although he was earning that much at the time, we realized that he couldn't go on working on ships for life," she says.

Another thing in common among the three entrepreneurs is that they all believed in plowing back--and did consistently plow back--their profits back into the business to make it grow. None of them needed to put in additional investments from other sources afterwards.
Recalls Linsangan-Moreno: "After establishing the name and clientele of our first Orange Blush salon, I put up our second branch eight months later using the revenues that the salon had made. Then I funded the putting up of all our other branches in the same way."

On top of this, she pursued a no-borrowing philosophy for growing the salons, putting more of her own money into them as needed. "The more the salons, the bigger the investment. There's definitely a need to increase your investment in your business as it grows. To keep up with the other salons and provide excellent service, you'll always need to provide funds for marketing, research and development, and for renovation and continuous innovation."

In Rempillo's case, being in a service industry requires him to put in more funds into the business only when he needs to hire freelancers for support when handling big projects. He explains: "In the past year and a half, we haven't acquired more equipment or materials to the business. We're cheap in the sense that we're not producing a product."

As to Coligado, just to be on the safe side, she decided to hang on to her nursing job at the provincial hospital until January 2008. That was when the business finally began receiving orders for export. "I realized then that I had to fully commit myself, my time, and my effort into our business," she explains.

Rough, smooth starts

Unlike Rempillo and Coligado, Linsangan-Moreno had a rough start with her business. "The first six months of the business was a most trying time for me," she says. "This was because I was only starting to learn how to run the business, how to handle people, how to keep customers, and how to keep the cash flowing into the business."

She had bought her first salon from a friend who couldn't sustain its operational costs, so she admits that she did not know much about the business at the start. She compensated for this by taking a crash course in cosmetology and by attending seminars to learn all she could about how to run a salon.

Six months after opening Orange Blush, however, all of her hairstylists were pirated by another salon, leaving Linsangan-Moreno no choice but to find younger stylists willing to be trained. She then had them undergo all the necessary training to do professional hairstyling work. At the same time, she got busy promoting her salon, establishing joint-activity tie-ups with schools in Cabanatuan and sponsoring concerts to draw in her targeted clientele--the youth.

All of these moves paid off for Linsangan-Moreno. Two months after her original staff left Orange Blush, she was able to save enough money to open a second salon in Cabanatuan. From then on, the business became stable and profitable enough, allowing her to quit her job as a medical technologist and to run Orange Blush as a full-time entrepreneur.

In contrast to the rough start of Linsangan-Moreno's salon, the first six months of En Theos in its design business were, according to Rempillo, "very, very good. Clients were coming in left and right, to the point that I had to turn down some of them because I couldn't handle their projects anymore."

He recalls that during that time, his wife Mira, herself a graphic artist, also went into business. She joined the public relations firm BrandSpeak Asia as its co-owner, vice president, and creative director; BrandSpeak Asia, run by two of her friends, used to be a client of En Theos.

Rempillo says that Mira's move slowed En Theos somewhat because she had taken her creative jobs and clients in En Theos to BrandSpeak Asia, but that it was also a plus because they gained a stake in the PR firm. "It also allowed En Theos to focus on exhibits, showroom design, and store design," he explains.

In the case of the Coligados, they were able to recover their initial investment in Ai-She Footwear as early as by its sixth month in business. Ai-She had quickly developed a sizable clientele, resulting in brisk sales. Today, the company sells over P100,000 worth of shoes and slippers weekly and employs 18 workers in a factory just a few steps away from the Coligado residence in Liliw.

Expansion, future plans

Growth is very much in the horizon for all the three entrepreneurs. Linsangan-Moreno says that Orange Blush Salon began franchising this year, and proudly reports that it opened its first franchised branch just last April at Daan Sarile in Cabanatuan. Her husband Lawrence, a certified public accountant and owner of several rice retail stores in Nueva Ecija, had helped her draft Orange Blush's franchise agreement; she married him in February 2008 or five years after she put up Orange Blush.

En Theos Creative, less than two years after going into business, is even more ambitious: it now intends to incorporate the sole proprietorship. Rempillo says he is now on the lookout for an architect, an interior designer, and experts in business development and finance to round out the minimum five incorporators needed to set up a company.

He says: "It's going to be a pay cut of sorts for me, but if my business group brings in more clients, and if I have two more people who can do the technical aspects of exhibit-booth or store designing, then I'd see a sudden expansion of our business."

On the other hand, Coligado continues to expand the distribution network of Ai-She Footwear. These days, she has also been making more and more frequent trips to Metro Manila, specifically Marikina, to get supplies for her footwear factory.

"My hands are full running our business, but with my husband's help, of course," she says. "We have to do this because it's still our only source of livelihood, and our workers also depend on it."

Most important moves

>Joby Linsangan-Moreno considers her having taken control of her first Orange Blush Salon and staying on top of it as the most important decision she has made in her business. While learning all she could about how a salon should be run, she had allowed a friend--the salon's previous owner--to continue running the salon.

She explains: "For me, setting your goals, realizing them, and staying focused is what will keep you in the business. No one should know more about your business than you do. When people see that you know what you want and where you are going, they will believe and trust you and your company."

>For En Theos Creative, on the other hand, what made the big difference was Oliver Rempillo's decision to operate it home-based. "You don't have to pay rent for an expensive office space in, say, Makati, and it helps keep your costs low," he says, adding that he makes it a point to meet clients at coffee shops and restaurants that he can conveniently commute to.

He says he gets a continuing flow of job orders from his network of regular clients, among them Dealo Koffee Klatsch, the popular bakery and coffee shop based in Lucban, Quezon; clients referred to him by his former colleagues at CITEM; and friends like Tony Gonzales, with whom he does subcontracting work for the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (ECCP).

>As to Corazon Coligado, she attributes the expansion of her footwear business to her decision to give samples of Ai-She Footwear's newest and trendy creations to stores outside of Liliw in Laguna, and even to convenience stores in gas service stations along South Superhighway. This approach to the business rather than just doing it in a fixed location was of great help in attracting more clients and more retail outlets for her products, she says.